If you’re anything like past versions of myself, then you’ve likely spent years perfecting the art of controlled eating, perhaps while trying to resolve a long list of symptoms through that same controlled way of eating.
And for women like me, many of those symptoms never seem to go away, no matter how “clean,” healthy, or intentional our eating continues to be. In fact, our symptoms often get more complicated over time, despite all our careful diets and restrictions.
Maybe you’ve been taking all the “right” supplements, cut out certain foods or entire food groups, learned to read labels, cook most of your meals from scratch, or have spent years trying different ways of eating in pursuit of better health. Maybe, also like I was even before I switched careers and began studying nutrition, you’ve become someone others come to for nutrition advice, despite having no formal training, simply because of how much thought and effort you’ve been forced into playing around feeding yourself and researching your symptoms.
I was a health practitioner long before I was officially a health practitioner because that’s what happens when your body feels so high maintenance and unhappy all the time!
But my guess is that you still struggle with stubborn symptoms that restriction and healthy eating haven’t completely resolved because this is the story that most of my clients bring to our work when they hire me; you try something new and feel better for a while, until your old symptoms, whether with digestion, sleep, energy, skin, or cycle, creep back and start taking over your life again.
In such scenarios, you may find yourself:
- Waking up exhausted, hours before your alarm, feeling like you’ve been hit by a bus despite doing everything “right” the day before.
- Feeling anxious and fatigued at the same time, wanting nothing more than to rest during the day when you don’t have time, but unable to truly settle at night.
- Developing more and more food intolerances, until even the foods you consider healthy feel threatening to your hypervigilant system, so you undereat to avoid digestive triggers.
- Your periods, which may never have been easy, as so many of our aren’t, may’ve become more painful as time goes on.
- Your libido may have dropped or become inconsistent, impacting your relationship if you have one and your connection to pleasure regardless of your relationship status.
- Your digestion, which has also grown more finicky with age, may feel random in what sets off your IBS symptoms, because you react to so many things. You have clear “food intolerances,” and then you just have a difficulty with food, in general!
And if pregnancy is a priority, which it is for so many women who follow my work, maybe you’ve also started wondering whether you’ll be able to conceive, if so much of your daily health already feels like a struggle for you as it is, which of course adds an emotional layer to to an already difficult experience with our bodies.
This is a lot of difficult experiences I just listed off that I know millions of women are navigating at the this very moment in their lives with their own bodies, and I know how difficult these experiences are because I’ve been through everything I write about — this is where my conviction comes from.
So, for those of you with paths like mine, this creates a confusing paradox, where we’ve spent years trying so hard to be healthy and eat well, only to feel more and more fragile in our own bodies and our daily lives. We start to see ourselves as high-maintenance, as if nothing we do will ever be enough for wellness to feel effortless. And the smallest stressors — dietary, relational, or otherwise — seem to carry outsized consequences, because our overall stress tolerance has become so darn low.
But here’s the thing: I don’t think these experiences are simply a matter of poor discipline, bad luck, bad genes, or even necessarily a hidden diagnosis waiting to be found, although any of these might play some role. More and more, I suspect that many modern women, especially those who’re health-focused, conscientious, perfectionistic, and may be used to overriding their own needs, have unknowingly become chronically undernourished.
We’ve normalized undereating. And believe me, it isn’t always obvious.
Many of us have adapted remarkably well to functioning in a state of energy scarcity. We’ve learned to rely on stress hormones to carry us through the day when our actual cellular energy is chronically low, and we may have gotten into the habit of speeding up as a form of self-protection, often without any awareness that we’re doing it. Because running on stress hormones suppresses appetite, and can actually feel pretty good for a while, undereating often doesn’t register as a problem early in life. In fact, undereating and running on stress hormones can feel productive. It can feel virtuous. It can even feel healthy!
Until it doesn’t.
At some point, many of us seem to cross an invisible threshold where our bodies can no longer compensate for undernourishment the way they used to. Sleep worsens. Cycles become irregular, painful, or disappear. Food intolerances creep in, and suddenly we can only eat a handful of foods without digestive problems. The natural impulse, and the protocol so many practitioners hand out, is to cut out the “problem” foods and adopt one restrictive diet or another, oftentimes with no clear solution to the underlying reasons so many otherwise healthy foods are a “problem” in the first place.
But for those of us who’ve tried this, usually many times, the relief tends to be short-lived. And as we get older, our original symptoms often creep back and bring some friends with them.
One pattern I’ve seen countless times in clients, and lived myself, is staying on a restrictive diet out of fear of triggering symptoms, while still living with symptoms every day! This can go on so long that we can no longer tell what causes our symptoms and what doesn’t, because the symptoms have become our new normal. And some foods have been off-limits for so long that we have no idea how they’d actually affect us now. In these circumstances, fertility can become even more elusive, because we’re consumed by more basic struggles, like sleeping through the night, digesting simple meals, and having enough energy to go to work.
We may catch every cold and flu going around because our immune system is under-resourced, and we may become more reactive to otherwise harmless environmental triggers, which makes life feel even less in our control.
We may start self-diagnosing histamine intolerance, gluten intolerance, mold toxicity, parasites, or MCAS before ever getting tested. Truthfully, many of us are dealing with some of these issues, and they do increase our sensitivity to a whole host of triggers. For women with these stories, modern adult life can feel like walking through quicksand. And we’re often taught, even in holistic health circles, that each of these issues is separate and deserves its own protocol and its own complicated, restrictive diet.
But I increasingly believe chronic undereating may be one of the quieter epidemics affecting women today, driving many of these other issues.
It may be especially true for women who focus heavily on their health and undereat for health reasons. But it also applies to women who are simply too busy to notice how much nourishment has been undervalued and pushed aside in their lives. In this article, I’ll explore why undereating has become so normal, why so many women don’t recognize it in themselves, and the three strategies I use to help women rebuild nourishment as a foundation for metabolic resilience, hormonal health, and, of course, fertility.
Strategy #1: Take an Honest Look at What Your Body Is Running On
The first place I start with clients is surprisingly simple: we look at a woman’s energy story through her health history, lifestyle, current diet, HTMA, and other lab results.
That isn’t because I think tracking food and running labs is inherently therapeutic (for most of us, it’s a pain!) or because those are the only measures we’ll use. (My direct experience of her in our sessions tells me a lot, too.) And it isn’t because I think every woman should spend the rest of her life calculating macros, unless her goal is to become more neurotic! It’s because so many women have become so used to eating in ways that are subtly inadequate for their bodies and their busy lives that they genuinely don’t recognize how often they’re undereating, stressed, and missing key nutrients.
Most of the women I work with aren’t deliberately depriving themselves; they’re conscientious and care deeply about their health, and many have spent years investing time, money, and energy in eating well.
Yet when we start documenting their intake, whether through a few days in Cronometer or simply writing meals down in a notebook, patterns emerge that neither of us expected. More often than not, she isn’t eating enough of the right things to fuel her metabolism and bring her body back into balance, especially after years of disruption and stress. Maybe she only eats twice a day, because coffee suppresses her appetite in the morning and work carries her through lunch. Maybe she eats plenty of nutrient-dense food, but very little overall energy, because her digestive reactions to carbs have slowly pushed her into an unintentional version of low-carb. (Pro tip: carbs are our most readily available source of energy!)
Maybe her diet looks balanced, but her total calories are simply too low for a breastfeeding mother of three, an executive working 50-hour weeks, or a woman carrying high stress from trauma or circumstances.
These situations look very different, but each one places a bigger demand on a woman’s body for more nutrients and more energy. Maybe her protein is too low to maintain muscle, support fertility, or keep her blood sugar stable, which is such a common pattern in women. Or maybe she’s unintentionally relying on fat as her main fuel, because years of toxic wellness messaging convinced her that carbs were inflammatory, addictive, fattening, diabetes-causing, or just vaguely incompatible with good health.
I’ve seen all of these patterns countless times, in hundreds of women, and I’ve lived several of them myself.
Not one of them led to sustainable wellness. Restricting healthy whole foods and food groups (I’m not talking about cutting out processed junk) is only ever a band-aid, never a true path to wellness. Often, women discover they’re simply eating far less than they thought, for no clear reason beyond low appetite, busyness, or poor planning. Or stress makes each day different: some days they get enough, other days they don’t. That inconsistency keeps the brain constantly scrambling to make sure there’s enough, since it never knows when the next “famine” might strike. And that scramble can become the nervous system state we live our whole lives in.
I’ve had clients realize they’re going six or seven hours without food simply because they don’t feel hungry, or doing it on purpose because intermittent fasting is supposed to be so healthy.
This is where I get particularly frustrated, because health culture itself often perpetuates women’s stress patterns and undernourishment. My own social media bubble is mostly women taking a nourishment-based approach like mine. But there are still entire corners of TikTok and Instagram where influencers are telling millions of women to eat less in the name of health, and demonizing nutritious foods. I’m convinced that slowly wreaks havoc on women’s health.
One recent client came to me after piecing together a protocol from TikTok, mostly from male wellness influencers.
When I saw what she was eating, it seemed completely random, and even disruptive for someone with gut issues as challenging as hers. When I asked why she’d chosen these foods and this way of eating, she told me one of those influencers had recommended eating carbs only later in the day, eating within a short time window (intermittent fasting), and focusing on high fiber. It was general advice, not tailored to her at all, and honestly, I found it pretty terrible even as general advice! For a small woman with blood sugar issues, severe IBS, and low energy, restricting carbs, eating windows, and overall intake will create stress alongside whatever symptom relief she experiences.
And that’s the tricky part: she was getting some relief while still suffering daily, which turns health into something like a slot machine.
When we’re alone, following generic advice in a state of information overload, we can easily form beliefs about what’s “working” that lead us astray over time. Try enough things, and something will eventually help for a while. (I write more about this trap, and about the random supplements so many of us throw at our symptoms, in my article on why generic health advice keeps failing us.)
Before any supplement or protocol, we want to look at the basics: overall nutritional intake, total calories, and daily appetite.
That tells us what the body may need before we start adding things with no evidence they’ll help. When those foundations are missing, and a woman is chronically undereating, her body doesn’t simply lose weight. It starts triaging for survival. Metabolic rate drops as the body reduces the conversion of thyroid hormone from its inactive form (T4) to its active form (T3), lowers body temperature, and slows digestion, all automatically, to conserve precious energy in the face of perceived scarcity.
This isn’t a malfunction. It’s a survival adaptation, because undereating is a survival issue.
The cost is that the body can no longer rely on steady, efficient energy production from a well-fed thyroid and healthy cellular energy output. Instead, it leans on stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline, which can mobilize quick energy in a pinch but were never meant to be our main fuel. Over time, this creates a body that feels “wired but tired,” anxious, and increasingly dependent on stress to function, because stress, not nourishment, has become its main source of get-up-and-go. The longer this goes on, the more distorted our appetite signals can become.
I no longer see appetite as only a simple biological signal that tells us when we need food; appetite is deeply shaped by context: stress, trauma, circadian rhythms, social connection, hormones, and the environments we live in.
Most of us live in a culture that rewards us, in one way or another, for overriding our bodily needs, and it hands us eating scripts that reinforce that. That’s essentially what diet culture is: various scripts for overriding our bodies’ signals for the sake of a number on a scale or a body composition that may or may not be healthy for us.
Here are some patterns I see all the time:
- We rush out the door with coffee in hand, skipping breakfast.
- We have no appetite in the morning because our cortisol is already high by the time we get up.
- We eat protein bars between meetings.
- We pride ourselves on productivity, and food comes last.
- We work through lunch and rarely eat a meal without a screen.
- We’ve normalized living in constant fight-or-flight and call it ambition.
- We feed our families first and ourselves last.
- We snack or binge in the evening to make up the difference and bring our cortisol back down.
- We eat alone, distracted or lonely, and end up undereating, or overeating to fill the missing social part of the meal.
Watching us squeeze eating into our busy lives as an afterthought, I find myself asking: what happened to slow eating, intentional food preparation, and the kinds of nourishment that sustained us through most of human history?
And what happened to women’s role in all of this? Modern conveniences freed us from much of the hard labor around food, which has given us enormous freedom. But what has it left us with when it comes to true nourishment, now that so much of it has been outsourced and deprioritized? To be clear, I’m definitely not saying a woman’s place is only in the kitchen. But I am pointing out that liberating ourselves from the kitchen almost entirely has created a culture that tries to fit nourishment into tiny pockets of our busy lives. It shows up in our health, and then we wonder why health doesn’t feel effortless.
For women who’ve spent years dieting, chasing aesthetic goals, following restrictive wellness trends, or navigating eating disorders, the relationship with hunger can become even more complicated because hunger cues can quiet down over time, and appetite suppression can start to feel normal.
Running on stress hormones can feel productive, motivating, even enjoyable, especially as it becomes familiar and the body starts to prefer that buzz. But eventually, the body can’t sustain the adaptation. That was my own story. That’s often when burnout hits. Mood-supporting and metabolic chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, thyroid hormone, and progesterone can drop, and we start feeling terrible “for no reason.” Of course, there’s a reason, even if the cascade of adaptations makes it hard to trace.
And very often, that reason is inadequate fuel, and the low energy states that follow.
That’s why I find it helpful to gather objective information before assuming what’s driving a woman’s symptoms. We look at calories, meal timing, macronutrients, mineral status, health and menstrual history, sleep, mood, energy patterns, exercise tolerance, food fears, and past dieting. Together, these form a picture of her overall nutrient status and energy. And instead of asking, “What’s wrong with my body?” we start asking a different question: Has my body simply been trying to do far too much with far too little for far too long?
That was the arc of my own story, too: too much demand on too little nourishment for too long, until all kinds of health issues grew out of the same pattern. Being a “health nut” for more than half my life didn’t protect me from it. If anything, it probably made it worse!
For many women, this shift from control and convenience to basic nourishment is a profound relief. Before investing in dozens of out-of-pocket labs, we can master the art of self-nourishment and simply eat more nutrient-dense food throughout the day. If our symptoms are, at least in part, the result of an under-resourced system, then the path forward involves more nourishing food and more energy support. Sometimes the solutions to our health issues aren’t the most complex ones, but the simplest ones we’ve been avoiding because of the personal responsibility change requires.
Eating more isn’t something anyone else can do for us. We can’t outsource it to a pill, a practitioner, or a treatment. It’s up to us, every day, to make sure our bodies have enough.
For a closer look at the specific signs of undereating, see my article on whether you’re accidentally on a low-energy diet.
Strategy #2: Build a Life That Actually Supports Nourishment
Once we’ve established that a woman may not be eating enough, the next question is much less about nutrition knowledge and much more about logistics, environment, and capacity. Because most women, especially the ones who follow my work, already know they should eat more regularly. Deep down, most women know eating breakfast would help them feel better and that skipping meals isn’t ideal. THEY FEEL IT.
The women I work with already know protein matters, because every health influencer on the internet talks about it.
But knowing what will help and having a life and habits that reliably support doing it are two very different things. Over the years, I’ve noticed that many women have built lives that are incredibly good at supporting productivity, caregiving, and outside obligations, and surprisingly poor at supporting their own nourishment or responding to their own bodies’ signals. I know this personally, because I’ve historically been one of those women.
In my C-PTSD work, we call the act of listening and responding appropriately to our bodies’ needs attunement. If we didn’t get that attunement from our caregivers growing up, it can be harder to recognize and meet our own needs as adults, and we’re more likely to build lives that justify ignoring them. For example: “I can’t go to bed earlier for my circadian rhythm because I have too much to do for work or my family,” says the woman who is chronically under-rested and burnt out, and regularly stuck in helplessness as a result.
This isn’t always about trauma, since we can all fall out of attunement with what our bodies need and what’s happening to us physiologically when these needs aren’t met.
But if it’s an issue for you, food can easily become one more thing to fit into an already full day, and one of the first things crowded out when life gets busy. If we don’t intentionally design our lives around regular nourishment, undereating often becomes the path of least resistance. The same can happen with rest, movement, hydration, or anything else that requires attunement. But fuel is the most important piece!
For women who live alone, undereating can look different than it does for women feeding a family or partner.
Single women often underestimate how much food they’ll need, shop for just a few days, run out faster than expected, and suddenly find themselves staring into a nearly empty fridge. I’ve experienced versions of this myself as a single woman, even as a professional health coach! There have been times in my life when I was too tired to cook at the end of the day and too unprepared to put together anything satisfying, so I got used to making do with minimal effort, and snacking began to masquerade as meals.
I don’t think this is a discipline problem for most of us. I think nourishment requires infrastructure.
It requires having enough food in the house, including foods that don’t demand much executive function if that’s something we already struggle with. Pro tip: if you’re busy and your energy is limited, expecting to put a lot of time and focus into every meal may be unrealistic. It may be best to keep it simple and focus on keeping enough protein, carbs, and fat in your fridge and pantry. Perhaps more than anything, eating enough asks us a difficult question: have we built lives that genuinely assume we deserve to be well fed, and make that a priority?
In sessions with my clients, we talk about:
- Schedules, and how they shape appetite and food choices
- Shopping rhythms: where, when, and why we shop
- Cooking capacity, storage space, and kitchen habits
- Family dynamics and demands
- Energy levels, and what kind of nourishment makes the most sense for them
- Decision fatigue, and how to streamline meals and let go of perfectionism
- Convenience foods, and when it’s okay to use them and cut corners
- Budgets and money concerns
If eating enough is going to last, it can’t depend on motivation alone. It has to be built into the structure of a woman’s everyday life. Sometimes that means realizing that feeding ourselves well may require as much intentionality as we give our careers, our relationships, and even our children.
The simple act of eating well each day, done with real intention, could move mountains for us.
I believe one big obstacle is that our culture doesn’t immediately reward nourishment. In fact, it makes nourishment expensive, both in the cost of nutrient-dense food and in the time spent shopping, preparing, cooking, and eating, time that could go toward earning money or getting recognition. Through that lens, we learn to see nourishment as a luxury or indulgence rather than a basic need.
Unfortunately, neglecting nourishment gets expensive too, as so many women realize when they come to me after losing some part of their basic health.
The solution here is to make shopping, preparing, and eating food a central feature of your life, whatever else you have going on. It can take time to build new schedules, habits, and priorities, and to let others go. But believe me when I say the investment in your basic health is always worth it.
Strategy #3: Pay Attention to What Comes Up When You Start Taking Nourishment Seriously
One of the most interesting things I’ve observed about eating more is that it often reveals far more about us than we expect.
At first, eating enough can seem straightforward. Set an appropriate calorie range, aim for balanced macronutrients, work toward consistency, and the main challenge is just remembering to eat. Sometimes it really is that simple. But in my experience, this is often where the deeper work begins, because once a woman makes nourishment a priority, many of the reasons she’s struggled to nourish herself start to surface.
Many women, especially mothers, realize they’ve spent years organizing their days around feeding everyone else and downplaying their own needs.
Women know exactly what their kids like, which snacks are running low, and what goes in school lunches, yet they discover they’ve been surviving on leftovers, grazing, or eating whatever’s left once everyone else is fed. And for women who live alone, like me, the barriers look different. Sometimes we shop for the version of ourselves we’d like to be, not the reality of our appetite, schedule, and energy needs. We run through groceries faster than expected and end up undereating, because making do with less at home has become normal.
Other times, we realize we’re so profoundly tired that food just isn’t a priority, and this is especially common for busy women who eat the same things all the time, or who’ve been restricting for digestive reasons, which can become a vicious cycle. Food simply stops motivating us.
If we’re working, caregiving, managing responsibilities, exercising, and chasing goals, possibly all on very little fuel, then by the end of the day we don’t want to shop, prep, and cook a nourishing meal on top of everything else. We’re worn out from decision-making, bored of eating the same foods, and craving novelty, convenience, comfort, or escape. That’s when we order takeout or sit in front of the TV with chips and ice cream.
Several women have told me that at the height of their burnout, grocery shopping was one of the most overwhelming tasks of all, partly because of the sheer energy the whole process takes.
Cost is another real obstacle. Living on the California coast, I know healthy food is not cheap! I’ve never been one to complain about how expensive things are, because it never felt like a healthy lens to live through, but it’s become an unavoidable concern for many women I talk with. It can feel very stressful to finally buy enough food for what your metabolism actually needs, and then realize how much it’s going to cost each month.
Since we can’t live in depletion either, this is where we look for ways to cut costs without cutting the nutrients our bodies so desperately need, which I help my clients with regularly.
For some of us, it also means looking at where our money is going and whether some of it would be better spent on nourishing food. That can be frustrating, but it’s also an important statement to ourselves about our values and priorities. Other obstacles are less practical and more emotional.
One of the biggest I see is the fear of weight gain, and sometimes the actual experience of it, when a woman starts eating more.
If you’ve managed your weight through stress hormones and calorie deficits for years, maybe your whole adult life, your body will likely need an adjustment period as your metabolism recovers, and some weight change can be part of that. This can stir up a lot emotionally, because it confronts long-held beliefs about discipline, attractiveness, morality, and what a “healthy” woman is supposed to look like.
One of the biggest obstacles I faced myself when I started eating more was noticing that receiving nourishment itself felt unfamiliar, even unsafe.
Starting in my preteens, I’d learned to sort foods, and how they made me feel, into “heavy” and “light.” I see this reflected back to me by many women in my community with histories of extreme diets like veganism, raw foods, fruitarianism, and restrictive eating for “cleansing” or spiritual purposes. Through this lens, lighter foods seem inherently healthier, cleaner, and maybe more spiritual or pure.
That feeling of lightness can become addictive.
These foods tend to be lower in calories, fat, and bioavailable protein, so they take less energy to digest, and we burn through them quickly. They can also leave us feeling ungrounded, and even spacey or disconnected over time, if they aren’t balanced with denser meals. “Heavier” foods, on the other hand, get associated with being unclean, weighed down, toxic, or bigger. For some of us, that includes the basic feeling of being full. Heavier foods tend to ground us, trigger our satiety hormones, and contain more concentrated carbohydrates, animal fats, and protein. They can also be harder to digest for those of us with low internal resources, if we’ve been undernourished for a long time and have developed stress responses to fullness itself.
If we undereat to stay “light, clean, and pure,” we’re also likely to have low stomach acid, low enzyme output, low nutrient status, and a lower tolerance for the very foods that would nourish, satisfy, and ground us most.
It becomes a vicious cycle. We eat for the feeling of lightness and get used to it. Our digestive capacity declines. We feel unwell when we eat heavier foods, and that seems to validate our beliefs, when in reality those experiences are being interpreted through a distorted lens of health. When a woman views healthy eating this way, her body may tolerate less and less food over time, as she grows more accustomed to the lightheaded, ungrounded feeling often mistaken for a spiritual state. It’s a clear path to disordered eating: a body that rejects more and more food, and a woman who eats only for bare survival while keeping herself small.
This path often has a strong social component, because restrictive eating can become very tribal when it’s approached through a moral or ideological framework, especially when social pressure and personal identity are tied to it.
I’ve seen this in nearly every dietary camp I’ve been part of, including veganism, paleo, and keto: any camp with a moral, historical, or cultural story about why it’s the “best” way for humans to eat. For many of us, undereating developed alongside years of chronic stress, or in environments where our needs were repeatedly deprioritized and unmet. Over time, being highly functional on very little can start to feel like an accomplishment, and even comfortable because it’s so familiar, even though it often costs us our vitality down the line. Truthfully, women stuck in survival mode aren’t oriented toward vitality.
I increasingly believe many of our symptoms make sense through this lens of stress adaptation.
Undereating usually isn’t laziness, ignorance, or a lack of discipline. More often, it reflects how we learned to survive within cultures, families, relationships, and nervous systems that rewarded self-sacrifice, productivity, constant activation, controlling our body size, and overriding our basic signals. That’s one reason I value taking a trauma-informed approach as a nutritionist. Eating enough isn’t always just about adding calories, nutrients, or foods. Sometimes it’s about learning to tolerate having needs in the first place, and learning, as adults, to meet them ourselves.
Sometimes it’s about grieving the years we spent disconnected from hunger and fullness, or the years we had to manage these things too young, when we needed adults to manage them for us.
I’ve felt frustrated countless times that I have to feed myself AGAIN. I already ate, and a few hours later, here I am needing to feed myself again, without anyone’s help. If that sounds like a childish frustration, that’s because it is. My siblings and I were neglected early in life, and we had to learn to feed ourselves long before that was developmentally appropriate. I now know that experience is unfortunately common, and it sets many women up to feel burnt out by basic tasks like feeding themselves as adults.
And even if we had adults cooking for us until we left for college, it’s actually a very new phenomenon for humans to plan, cook, and eat all their meals alone! If it feels overwhelming and exhausting, it’s probably because it often is. We can feel as though we’re solely responsible for our own survival, when historically, feeding ourselves was always a family and community endeavor, never a task done entirely alone.
Seen this way, it makes sense that so many modern women avoid or deprioritize daily nourishment. It’s an adaptation to our time and place, one that happens without any real famine or food scarcity behind it.
But seeing it as an adaptation doesn’t let us off the hook from the responsibility of learning to nourish ourselves fully. Sometimes our bodies are asking for something remarkably simple: enough energy, enough consistency, and enough safety to stop relying on stress physiology to get through life. But even a simple ask isn’t always easy to recognize when our survival patterns depend on not recognizing it.
This is some of the most meaningful work I do with clients: helping women get familiar with their own obstacles to basic nourishment.
We certainly talk about calories, meal timing, and macronutrients. But we also get curious about what comes up when a woman starts treating herself as someone worth feeding consistently. What throws off her day or week when she prioritizes consistent, nutrient-dense meals and snacks? It’s important to start relating to ourselves as deserving of resources, attention, and care, and to practice this before we hit depletion and burnout. That doesn’t mean eating perfectly all the time. I still don’t, and I do this for a living!
The point is that we know what matters, notice how we feel each day, prioritize nourishment, build our lives around it, and learn from what comes up along the way.
“If Undereating Is Such a Big Problem, Why Are So Many People Overweight?”
This is a reasonable question, and I get it often, especially because many of us grew up in a culture where the conversation about food centers on eating too much, and on the very real health consequences of obesity, diabetes, and metabolic syndrome.
We’re taught that modern people eat too much, move too little, and just need more discipline. And after a lifetime of diet-culture marketing, it’s second nature to assume that if we all ate less and exercised more control over our food, we’d all be healthier. (I partly agree, but it’s not as simple as self-control.) Certainly, for some people, eating more than they burn contributes to poor health. And large parts of the population eat diets built on heavily processed foods, high in low-nutrient ingredients like refined flours and corn syrup, and in seed oils, which I believe are inflammatory.
These patterns clearly contribute to poor health across our culture.
But I don’t think this contradicts what I’ve been describing, and these patterns don’t apply to most women who follow my work, likely including you. I actually believe these two realities, being undernourished by processed food and undereating overall, often coexist, sometimes in the same woman at different times. I don’t believe most people become metabolically unhealthy after decades of being deeply nourished, well rested, adequately resourced, socially connected, and living in line with their biological needs.
Many of us are navigating modern life in bodies that have been adapting to various kinds of scarcity for years, including scarcity of:
- Time, or time well spent
- Rest
- Community, intimacy, and meaningful connection
- Micronutrients and quality food
- Pleasure, healthy sexual expression, and connection
- Safety where it matters most, and growth where it matters most
And, most importantly for this article, we’re often living with chronic scarcity of adequate energy.
For women especially, I don’t see overeating as the opposite of undernourishment. Often, it may be a response to undernourishment, as it was for me during my decade-long struggle with bulimia and binge eating. I was severely stressed and undernourished, and I’d overeat when my survival states hit their peak and I couldn’t white-knuckle it any longer. But overeating wasn’t the root of my problems. I had extreme sugar cravings that hijacked my focus and led to impulsive eating I’d feel ashamed and stressed about afterward.
I was never overweight, so my behaviors weren’t seen the way they might have been if I had been. But it was never about willpower or self-control for me. It was always about a starving, undernourished brain and body. I’m happy to say I haven’t dealt with difficult or disruptive cravings in about a decade. Whenever I feel a strong craving for sugar, carbs, fat, or salt, I interpret it as an energy signal, and I listen!
Many of the women I’ve worked with who struggled with their weight weren’t eating substantially more than women whose weight stayed stable.
Most of the women in my life who’ve struggled with their weight weren’t eating nonstop. If anything, they’d spent years cycling through restriction, intense exercise, dietary rules, and attempts to control bodies that no longer seemed to regulate themselves easily. By the time I meet women with these patterns, they’re usually in their thirties, forties, or beyond, and they’re usually exhausted. If this is your pattern too, you’ve likely become more and more dependent on outside strategies to manage your symptoms, body composition, or energy, without realizing that the foundations of your metabolism may have been compromised much earlier in life.
And if you’re constantly hungry and craving specific things, that’s a signal that your body needs more energy, or better energy metabolism. Maintaining a healthy weight shouldn’t be a full-time job.
Perhaps this is one reason undernourishment is so hard for health-conscious women to recognize in themselves: they’ve been treating it like a full-time job, and all they can see are their cravings, impulses, and struggles with overeating. When we hear “malnourished,” we picture famine, visible thinness, or severe deprivation. We don’t usually picture women who shop at Whole Foods, buy organic produce, take supplements, and spend considerable money optimizing their health.
But over the years, I’ve watched some of the sickest, most health-conscious women I know regain their vitality through something surprisingly simple: learning to eat enough to finally convince their bodies they no longer need to survive on stress hormones.
A Different Way to Think About Nourishment
If there’s one thing I hope you take away from this article, it’s that undereating isn’t always obvious, and it may be a key driver of your health and fertility struggles.
It doesn’t always look like visibly restricting food, skipping every meal, or trying to lose weight, even if those are part of your pattern. More often, it creeps in quietly as we adapt to modern life, misguided aesthetic goals, and a lifestyle of constant activation. We get used to running on coffee, takeout, salads as meals, and, of course, stress hormones. We override our hunger because work needs to get done, we run out of food, or we don’t have access to the “clean” foods we prefer.
We also get more cheap dopamine from screens and stimulants, and less of the connection that used to come from sharing meals with people we love, all of which can make eating less appealing over time.
Eating enough isn’t a cure for every area of scarcity and misattunement in our lives. But I increasingly believe it creates the conditions for many aspects of our health to improve naturally, with far less force. It’s honestly incredible to witness how much agency women feel across their lives once they actually have enough energy in their bodies to function well! When we’re well fed, we often sleep more deeply, because our blood sugar is stable and we have the resources to produce the hormones we need for rest and recovery.
When we’re well fed, we tolerate stress better, because our overall capacity grows as the body moves out of the contracted state a calorie deficit keeps us in.
We regulate our nervous systems more easily after hard experiences, because we have the glucose, protein, fat, vitamins, and minerals to handle shifts in energy demand. And one result of consistent nourishment I can’t emphasize enough: we learn to trust our own appetites again. We can also become less reactive to the world around us when we’re not chronically hangry from low blood sugar and excess cortisol.
Our menstrual cycles sit downstream of our stress physiology, energy metabolism, blood sugar, thyroid, and immunity.
I think of the cycle as a monthly report card on the resilience of our overall health. When we’re eating well, our cycles often become more robust reflections of our health, rather than monthly reminders of how depleted we are and how hard it is to live as a depleted woman. And perhaps most importantly, we get to practice relating to ourselves differently: not as bodies to control, fix, or outsmart, but as whole beings asking to be prioritized and cared for.
You’d think that would be self-explanatory, but clearly it isn’t, since my business is built on helping women get back to this simple truth!
If This Resonates With You
One of the many reasons I love my work is that I know firsthand how hard it can be to recognize undernourishment in ourselves, especially after years of genuinely trying to be healthy and still struggling.
If you now suspect you may be undereating, here are a few places to start:
- Track your intake for a short time. Use an app like Cronometer or MyFitnessPal, or simply write down what you eat, when you eat, and how you feel before and
- after. You can even take photos of your meals. (If you have a history of disordered eating, tracking may not be right for you, and it’s best done with support.)
- Download my reparative eating guide to see which foods I recommend, and why.
- Look at your symptoms and your lifestyle and ask what they might be telling you about your current intake.
- Get an HTMA and other nutrient testing to see where your nutrient levels stand, and focus on getting nutrients from food before jumping into a supplement protocol.
- Set reminders to eat every three to four hours, and notice whether your energy and overall health improve.
Sometimes we need another set of eyes to help us step back, ask more foundational questions, and see our patterns more objectively. I’m here for any woman who wants to experience deeper self-nourishment and bring her body back into balance by eating more. Together, we’ll look at your health history, your relationship with food, your current intake, your menstrual and fertility history, your energy patterns, your mineral status through HTMA, and any other labs or data that help us understand what your body is working with.
From there, we rebuild nourishment from the ground up, starting with more food.
We’ll work on getting you out of survival mode, even if those states have served you throughout your life, because we can’t get healthy and normalize nourishment while staying stuck in survival physiology indefinitely. My approach is food-first, trauma-informed, and deeply individualized, because no two women arrive at undereating for the same reasons, have the same patterns, or rebuild nourishment in the same way.
If you’ve been struggling with fatigue, hormonal symptoms, digestive issues, fertility concerns, poor sleep, low appetite, food intolerances, or the sense that your body is becoming more high-maintenance despite years of doing everything right, you might be surprised how connected these symptoms are, with undernourishment as a common thread running through them.
This is especially important if you’re approaching or already in perimenopause, when the natural decline in hormones and resources can intensify the depletion you may already live with. My article on perimenopause goes deeper into this, and you can read more about that here if you’d like.
If you’d like to explore whether working together is a good fit, you can book a free consultation with me here. And if we’re a good fit, I’d be honored to guide you toward a more nourished version of yourself.
